Today I spent a long time (too long) thinking about whether to extend the User model so I could use eloquent relationships between two types of users.

For example, these two relationships would need the same name, and therefore live on separate models:

// Teacher has many classes. app\Teacher to extend User?
    public function classes()
    {
        return $this->hasMany(Group::class, 'teacher_id');
    }

// Student belongs to many classes. app\Student class to extend User?
    public function classes()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany(Group::class);
    }

This didn't feel right. Besides being an intimidating change in infrastructure, I also already have and some neat auth checks linked to Roles and Users.

I have seen local scopes used before so I thought this could be a good opportunity to use them. The below code will allow me to call Users with a given Role from the database with a whereHas check:

    /**
     * Scope a query to only include users with a given role.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Builder  $query
     * @param  mixed  $type
     * @return \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Builder
     */
    public function scopeWithRole($query, $role)
    {
        return $query->whereHas('roles', function (Builder $query) use ($role) {
            return $query->where('name', $role);
        })->get();
    }

Now I can call User::withRole('teacher')->classes but it still doesn't solve my duplicate method name for User::withRole('student')->classes.

Maybe I give them unique names and be done with it? Will update after more thought.